A Hunger for Peace

Isaiah 5:1-7
October 6, 2014
We share a hunger for shalom. That hunger, as innate and universal as the hunger for food, gnaws at us all, for we all know too well its absence. We cry “peace, peace” but there is no peace.
Whether we speak of global and international situations or domestic and familial ones, we know all too well the absence of peace in our lives. Open the laptop, flip on the television, glance at a headline, or listen to the neighborhood chat, and you know this.It is tempting, often, to throw up one’s hands in despair at this and give up all hope of it ever being any other way. It is tempting, often, to retreat and tend to one’s own garden, to turn inward in discouragement, to seek solace in solitude or escape in mindless entertainments, to find numbness in one or another narcotic.

I suspect that we have all been down one of those roads, and perhaps we’ve been down more than one. That’s not surprising. After all, we live in a culture that seems, all too often, to celebrate violence and one that is certainly awash in it. We are shaped by the myth of redemptive violence and are enthralled by its spell socially, economically, politically and spiritually.

If this were a book instead of a sermon, I’d trace down each of those broad categories and flesh out fully how, for example, hierarchical structures in schools, churches and business are shaped by and perpetuate the myth of redemptive violence socially. It would be sadly simple to do so. It would be even simpler to show how vast sectors of our economy – from the entertainment industry to the weapons manufacturers – are broadly dependent upon the myth, and thus willingly perpetuate it. Our politicians, and thus our politics, pay homage to the myth at every opportunity, and all of that shapes, reshapes, and, ultimately, deforms our spiritual lives. None of this is difficult to demonstrate.

The myth of redemptive violence, as the late Walter Wink put it, “enshrines the belief that violence saves, that war brings peace, that might makes right. It is one of the oldest continuously repeated stories in the world.”[1]

Wink traces it back to the oldest known creation myths, including the Babylonian Enuma Elish, according to which creation is an act of violence by violent gods who establish order from chaos by means of disorderly violence. The Enuma Elish dates back to at least 1,200 years before the time of Jesus, and predates the Babylonian exile of the people of Israel by some 600 years.

During that exile, the words that now open our Bible were written, and Jewish priests inscribed a direct counterpoint to the Babylonian creation myth. Thus, according to the Genesis story, a gracious God creates a good creation. “Chaos does not resist order. Good is prior to evil”[2] and violence and evil enter creation as a result of the brokenness of the human creature.

In other words, it’s a lot more complicated and nuanced than the simple, Manichean division into good and evil, into good guys and bad guys, us and them, friends and enemies.

Certainly the entire ministry of Jesus calls into question such simplistic divisions. The call to love enemies, to pray for those who persecute us, to break bread with the marginalized and the outcast demands of us some fundamental rethinking of the black and white divisions that we too often use to judge the world around us.

Isaiah also challenges such simplistic divisions, and the text this morning reminds us of the call to act with justice for all people. As Amy Steele, who teaches at the Vanderbilt Divinity School, puts it, this text “also cautions us against assuming postures of privilege, as if our way of life or worship will somehow guarantee our … well-being.”[3]

Well-being is one of the various meanings captured in the single Hebrew word shalom, which also suggests right relationship with community and with God as well as peace.

For many years the first Sunday of October has offered up the lovely liturgical confluence of World Communion Sunday and Peacemaking Sunday. There’s something quite compelling about pairing a small “c” catholic – as in “universal” – gathering at table with a recommitment to the equally universal call to the followers of the Prince of Peace to the work of peacemaking.

The thing about communion – the key aspect of it, I believe – is that no one is compelled to come to this table. The church – that is to say, you and I – do not demand it. Rather, we offer it to all who gather responding the invitation of the One who said, “come, and I will give you peace.”

As Martin Niemoller said, “You must not say that you want or demand peace from everybody, for the way of Christ is not to demand but to offer peace. I think that is also the way of his church – it has to be the way of his church – to offer peace. [… God] offered […] peace in Christ Jesus, and the way to put into action the love of Christ is to love our enemies. That is not just a sentimental matter,” wrote the pastor who spent almost a decade of his life in a Nazi concentration camp, “that is the way God brings about good things in [the] world and development for the better among the human beings on this globe.”[4]

None of this is easy, and all of it is incredibly complex, as well. It plays out in deeply personal and broadly political ways. None of us lives it perfectly.

I was reminded of that in a powerful essay published last week concerning opposition to the Islamophobic vitriol of Pamela Geller, who is known for the hateful bus and subway ads she’s placed on Metro and other major metropolitan transit systems around the U.S. Geller last week put on hold a campaign that was to have featured images of slain journalist James Foley, when Foley’s family, rising above their own deep wounds and grief, asked her not to use pictures of him in her latest ads.

As Jay Michaelson, writing in The Jewish Daily Forward, put it

“Geller is a fundamentalist like the [terrorists of ISIS] are fundamentalists; she is irrational like they are irrational.

“And another irony: So are we, if we simply assume that Geller is over there, and I’m over here. Moderate/Extremist is just another Us/Them dichotomy — one that gives me a pass just as Geller’s Us/Them dichotomy gives her.

“Actually, we are all Pamela Geller to some extent: She is simply the manifestation of the fearful, irrational, and hateful parts of each of us. There’s a Geller inside me and a Geller inside you. I can listen to that part of myself and “know she’s right.” Or I can listen to it, reflect on it, and explore whether that’s the voice I want to obey.”[5]

For followers of Jesus, there is another voice speaking – one that says, “be not afraid,” one that says, “love one another as I have loved you,” one that says, “love your enemies,” one that says, “follow me,” one that says, “this is my body, broken for you.”

Peacemaking begins at table as we respond to that invitation, break bread together, and discover a common hunger for shalom. Amen.

[1] Walter Wink, The Powers That Be (New York: Doubleday, 1988) 42.

[2] Ibid. 46.

[3] In Preaching God’s Transforming Justice, Year A, Ottoni-Wilhelm, Allen, and Andrews, eds. (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 2013) 419-20.

[4] Martin Niemoller, in The Way of Peace, ed. Walter Wink (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2000) 63.

[5] http://forward.com/articles/206504/we-are-all-pamela-geller/#ixzz3F10Kusjh